BlackBerry-equipped Porsche 911 Carrera S pictures and hands-on

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RIM has shown just what BlackBerry 10 is capable of by implementing the mobile computing engine into a Porsche 911 Carrera S.

Pocket-lint got some hands-on time with the vehicle, though sadly we weren’t allowed to take it for a spin.

The first thing we noticed about the car was the PlayBook that sat in the dashboard. Here’s where you are able to manually access all your media content and menu interfaces, though it also has voice control, a safer bet while on the road.

Vlingo powers the speech recognition and we were able to summon a Bob Marley and the Wailers album as well as YouTube, despite the noise generated from the watching crowd.

YouTube you ask? Yes the car is connected to the internet and with two additional PlayBooks attached to the back of the front seats, passengers can be kept amused by surfing the web or watching videos.

Yet as the driver, you have full control of the entire car including the two passenger PlayBooks.

The Porsche was kitted with NFC technology so to pair a BlackBerry NFC-enabled device was as simple as placing the phone down on the mat sandwiched between the driver and front passenger seats.

This has the added benefit of the car becoming personalised depending on the driver. Useful if the car has multiple users or even if it were part of a fleet of motors, for example.

The analogue cluster has been replaced by a digital one, which only added to the aesthetics as well as the tech credentials.

We tested the handsfree call quality of the system, which comes through two speakers on either side of the car. It was excellent, though it would no doubt suffer when bombing down the fast lane at 70MPH with the roof down.

Unfortunately the car on display is the only one of its type in the world. However, of the 14 million cars currently on the road today that are equipped with info-entertainment systems, 60 per cent run on QNX, the platform that supports BlackBerry 10.

This means that nine million cars are capable of supporting this technology already. We just need BlackBerry 10 to be rolled out.

CEO Thorsten Heins unveiled the car at his keynote at BlackBerry World, barely able to contain his excitement as seen in the video below.

What do you think to the BlackBerry equipped Porsche 911 Carrera S? Let us know.